


steal me away with your eyes and your mouth

by pendules



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Blue Lily Lily Blue Spoilers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 19:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3500108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendules/pseuds/pendules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe Ronan only knows how to love dream things.</p><p>Adam's not anyone's dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	steal me away with your eyes and your mouth

It starts here: They're kissing in Adam's bed in a room above a church where Ronan sits next to a brother he could never love and a brother he dreamt into existence and prays. _Prays for what?_ he thinks, not for the first time. _What do you pray for that you can't pull out of your head?_ Home, his father, his family awake and alive and back together. Maybe he prays for _this_.

Ronan at the Barns and Ronan downstairs amongst his holy things and _this_ Ronan — they have more in common than he would have thought.

Ronan touches him like he wants to reach _inside_ him, get his blood on his hands, like that would sustain him. He kisses him like he wants to put him on his tongue and swallow him whole.

*

Only it started a long time before.

Adam's secret is: He looks at Ronan just as much as Ronan looks at him.

Only he's thinking, _Why though? Do you love me like you love God, like you love Gansey, like you love Matthew and Aurora? Is that what this is or do you love me because I'm here?_

Maybe Ronan only knows how to love dream things.

Adam's not anyone's dream.

 _I'm not what you want me to be_ , he thinks. _I'm sorry._

*

Adam doesn't know how to love either.

He was raised by a man who only felt with violence. He's going to kill Gansey. Blue had told him, _It's not gonna be you_ , looking so sad.

Sometimes, though, he thinks about holding Ronan's hand. He doesn't know what it's about. He wonders what would happen if he touched him like that. He gave Cabeswater his eyes and his hands and they crave the Greywaren.

Maybe Adam just wants to touch and be touched. Wants to be allowed to.

*

He tells him once. After. After Persephone and after Greenmantle and after the cave. Adam doesn't want to talk, so he drops him off at St. Agnes and he's getting out of the car without saying anything and Ronan says it, and then he's driving away, and they're still not talking.

*

He knows he shouldn't, knows it's a bad idea and it's going to lead nowhere good, but he _wants_. Not Ronan, not yet. But he wants to be wanted like that. And he knows Ronan will give him anything he asks for.

Ronan's lying on the floor next to his bed and all it takes is Adam slowly reaching down to gently wrap his fingers around Ronan's wrist. He's not asleep; he rarely ever is around any of them anymore. Somehow this feels more dangerous than any horror he could bring back with him.

It's awkward with the lights out but they make it work, firm hands holding bodies in place in a tiny, tiny bed, mouths like anchors. They don't let go all night.

*

Adam goes to school; Ronan doesn't. When he comes back from work, he's still there. Lying on a pew, head tipped back. Adam thinks he's asleep for a moment, but then his eyes open and he sits up when he sees him.

"Were you dreaming?" he asks, dropping his stuff on the floor, sitting down next to him. It's the first thing he's said since Ronan showed up last night.

"Nah, just thinking."

And somehow that's even scarier.

"You knew," he says, like an accusation. "You knew all along. Why now?"

Adam shakes his head.

"I don't know. Maybe I just wanted to see what it'd be like."

"And?" Ronan asks. It feels like the moment is balancing on a knife's edge now.

"I think we should do it again."

"Okay," Ronan says, without pausing to take a breath, blue eyes softening almost imperceptibly.

*

It's good after that — for a while. Ronan kisses him amongst sleeping things and trees and in his shitty apartment and in the backseat of the Hondayota and even in his room at Monmouth sometimes. He can almost forget about the choice he's not really making.

Until Gansey walks in on them in the kitchen-laundry-bathroom and it all goes to shit.

"So, were either of you going to tell me about this?" he says, like it's just another problem to solve in the Quest that is his life.

"It's not your business," Ronan says at the same time Adam says, "There's nothing to tell."

The _nothing_ hangs in the air, and he can feel Ronan's burning gaze on his face.

Gansey just stares at both of them for a moment, and then Adam walks out the door.

*

Ronan corners him before he can make it outside.

"Is this what you really want, because I don't think it is. This isn't what _I_ —"

"Sometimes I think you're worse than Gansey, but I don't owe you, I don't owe you a damned —"

"Gansey didn't choose you because he thought he could control you. He chose you because he knew he _couldn't_."

And he's right — Gansey doesn't have to control any of them. They’d all walk to the end of the earth and to their deaths for him, all of their own free will. Only this doesn't end in _Adam's_ death.

He's seen both of them die: Ronan covered in blood on a church pew, Gansey at his hands. And it's probably already happened. Time is a flat circle. He can't stop thinking about his own these days. Cabeswater will never show him that. It's unknowable like he used to think he was.

Ronan embraces death and Gansey's living on borrowed time, and maybe he's always known somehow, maybe that's what this is about, making his mark while he has the chance. Adam is sick with the fear of it. It's like a real, living creature pressing down on his heart.

He sacrificed himself for a forest once but that was selfish, that was different, that was wanting to be immortal and wanting to be someone else, something _more_.

He's a magician but maybe he stole the magic.

Cabeswater's going to abandon him too, he knows, and then what? Then Ronan is probably going to stop looking at him like _that_.

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's how he dies.

*

Ronan hasn't been around in a week and he could probably do this forever, so now Adam's knocking on his door at Monmouth. He's probably not even there; he's probably gone back to the Barns, dreaming up more ways to wake his father's creations.

But the door opens, more quickly than it ever does, and he's there, Chainsaw perched on his shoulder. Ronan just moves aside to let him pass and the bird returns to her cage. Adam doesn't turn back to look at him, just goes over to stroke her feathers. He's surprised she doesn't flinch away from him, such an extension of Ronan she is. Her expression is pretty judgmental though. He deserves that.

"I don't know how to go back, to before, to whatever we had. Whatever we _were_."

"You're not the same person anymore," Ronan says, like an apology.

Adam doesn't know who he is, who he ever was.

Ronan is Ronan though. Ronan is _Ronan_ , and he's Chainsaw, and he's all the beautiful things he pulls out of his dreams, and he's his religion, and he's his childhood home, and he's his father's son, and he's the faith Gansey has in him, and he's Adam's —

Maybe he's just _Adam's_.

There's a part of him that belongs to Adam, a part he gave up a long time ago.

Adam wants to be that brave, he wants —

"Yeah, I am. I'm still that person. Gansey couldn't save me from that, and you can't either."

Maybe they saved him from a double-wide but he's still all those things: resentful, toxic, cowardly.

It's probably going to lead them all to their deaths.

Adam's seen it enough, them dying, in Cabeswater, in his dreams, constantly behind his waking eyes.

*

Ronan practically drags him outside, tells him, "Just shut up and get in the car."

They don't say anything, like that first night. They don't need to. Adam can read it all, in the set of his jaw, the tension of his hand on the gearshift. He wants to look and he wants to touch and he wants _Ronan_ , suddenly, inexorably. Only he can't. Not anymore.

Adam sits on the grass, watches him talk to his mother, listens to Cabeswater.

"What's it saying?" Ronan says, sitting cross-legged in front of him.

"It's — quiet. It's like it's giving us space." It's too quiet in his head, too many of his own thoughts getting through, unrepressed.

"You remember when we found Cabeswater and it was even better because it was _real_? That's how I felt when I met you." _Maybe I dreamt you_ , he'd said, and maybe he has a part of Ronan in him now too.

He wants to tell him, _I'm going to ruin you, like I ruin everything._

Except then Ronan says, "It chose you, you know. Like I did."

There's always a choice — _what do you want, Adam_ — and maybe it's time to make it.

He wants that wish, he wants to save Gansey, wants Ronan to save his mother and brother, wants them to stop losing people, wants them to go home together, wants to lay his head on Ronan's chest, close his eyes, wants them to dream of fantastical things and to wake up to find what they really want is right there.

He takes Ronan's hand, like Cabeswater is urging him to do, like he's wanted to do for months and months, tells him quietly, "I choose you too."


End file.
